Running fiber inside the Guard Cables of the High Voltage Transmission towers is a practice that dates back to the mid 90's.

Having said that, the location of a Datacenter is dictated as much by water, energy and fiber, as it is dictated by financial incentives to "git'em-jubs". Discounts on the land, tax rebates and such. Probably, the politicians with the dam tought that the dam alone would be enough to sawy Meta, meanwhile, the politicians in alberta were more acapable to achieve their goal

I was not saying that there are no alternatives. I was just singing the praises of IrfanView. IrfanView was already installed on the machine that had a CD/DVD drive, and of all the Image SW already installed, and that I knew how to use, was the only one that "did the deed"

I was not saying that there are no alternatives. I was singing the praises of IrfanView.

For all the NaySayers about the Pentium 1 300 Mhz, that demanded citations and such:

As I clearly said, it was a MOBILE part, and it was soldered to the board, not socketed (at that era intel had a weird solution for that they were promoting agressively to manufacturers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The codename was Tillamook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

My machine was a machine I bought in 1999. A Thinkpad 2611-451 with the P1 300Mhz option because it was cheaper than the P2 Option, and faster than the 256Mhz option (the P2 option also bundled a DVD, and an Mpeg2 decoder card, which made it waaaaaaay too expensive). I never modded it to support an AMD K2 or K3 (which, I think, came latter as options).

While the industrial design was made by IBM, the innards, (even the BIOS) was designed and manufactuerd by ACER for IBM, as a way to lower costs and MSRP.

https://macdat.net/laptops/ibm...

It was obsolete from day one, yet competitive with my machines at work at the time (well, not the K series PA-RISC servers ;-) ). As machines progressed, eventually both my personal desktop (a PIII 700Mhz clone), and my work desktop, and then laptop, and then desktop again, handly surpassed it, so I saw no need to update it (anything it could not do, I could do on my personal desktop, or at work).

When it was time to do the MBA in late 2005 and all of 2006, the electronics enginner in me considered (and rightly so), that the machine (with a lot of optimization and fine tunning) was good enough for word, excel and powerpoint, as well as the early web and such. I was not poor or anything, but since the MBA was outside my country, I did not want to spend money I did not need to spend, lest some unforseen problem arise, or an investment opportunity arose, or I had a VERY SPECIFIC need in my computer. None of the 3 scenarios came to pass.

The replacement was a Core-Duo (sans 2) bottom of the barrel toshiba with an Xpress 200 chipset in 2007, an impulse purchase (even in 2007 I saw no need to replace the IBM laptop), bought at the spur of the moment, because it was oh-so-cheap, I could not pass it up.

The replacement for that was a late 2008 Aluminum macbook, the only macbook with not another word in the name (like air, pro, retina or neo) ever done on aluminum.
I am typing this on an early 2015 air, and my desktop is a 6 core mini 2018. I still game on that (via bootcamp) thanks to a GTX1070 over TB3
A modded synology DS1515+ is storing all my data.

Replacement for the two machines and the NAS is due for (boreal) autum 2028.

I have two anecdotes from my use of IrfanView, and why it is so well regarded to this day:

1.) In 2006 I was using a Pentium 1 300Mhz (in not a type, there was a mobile versions of the P1 that reached 300Mhz) with Win2000. Windows media player would take close to 100% of the processor to play an MP3, Clasic Media player would tale 50%, IrfanView + an MP3 player Plug-in would take only 30%, a true lifesaver.

2.) In 2022 I fell of a roof and broke my scapula. IrfanView 32 bit with a suitable plug-in was the only SW that could see the DICOM medical images of my Rx and CAT CDs. Alas, the medical Images plug-in is not available in the 64 bit version...

Plenty small, plenty fast, plenty fleible. Hurray for IrfanView.

As some others have stated before me, if they go to dual solutions, one of the solution will be "Whatever the Telco-core vendor supports for the NFVs". Most Telco core vendors support VMWare & OpenStack, but not "any" OpenStack. The insists on one (or a select few) flavours. RedHat being one of them. There are only two core vendors that available for T-Mobile, Ericsson and Nokia (the USoA govt' made Huawei and ZTE a no-go). So, search what on-prem cloud solutions Ericsson and Nokia support, and you will have a very good clue of one of the 2 providers T-Mobile will end up using.

VMWare is more than virtualization.

OpenStack technical trainer here:

If you think of VMWare in 2026 as virtualization only solution, like we still are in 2006, then sure, KVM, or QUEMU, Xen, BSD's VMM, or Hyper-V are cromulent options.

But nowadays, VMWare, XenServer/Xencloud, on Premises Azure et al are used to make Private Clouds, or the fleets running on them use a few advanced functions beyond virtualization, with all that implies. Very few workloads are "virtualization only", not touching any of the advanced or the cloud-dy functions .

The linux equivalent would be OpenStack, with all the load that implies.

And yes, many of the FOSS solutions run KVM under the hood, with a few exceptions like Xen based ones, or BSD's vmm and vmmd, but again, what really counts in 2026 is not the Hypervisor, but all the other advanced stuff built atop of it.

There is another aspect in this too, and it is Application support. Many ISVs certify their platforms/apps on specific OSs/Distros running on Specific Hypervisors.

So, for instance, your ISV may say: Only Windows Server 2022 or 2025 only, RHEL 10, or Suse 16, on top of VMWare, Openstack or Azure.

And there you are, for those workloads, you can forget about all the other solutions (obscure or not) that homelabbers love to peddle. Big corpos can pressure smaller ISVs to support their preferred solution, but the big ISVs will most likely put a few options on offer, and that's it.

In those cases, large intitutions (like T-Mobile, the focus of the article) have 100s or even 1000s of ISVs some more crititcal than others, and they need to reach commonality of solutions, or personel requirements ballon (the legacy VMWare group, the Openstack group, the XenCloud group, the ProxMox group, the Azure group, the Nutanix group, the....) along with all the other support functions (negotiations and keeping track of support contracts for each technology). A veritable nightmare. So, unlike homelabbers, Big corpos will probably go to a one or two vendor solution for their internal clouds.

Since VMWare was the leader, and for many lustres a model citizen, pretty muche every single ISV offered them as a supported option, therfore, it was the easier default.

So, get out of VMWare ASAP, but be warned it will be hard, as you need to provide alternatives to the advanced functions, and align certification requirements for support.

Also, use this as a clean-up opportunity . Retire redundant APPs, retire inhouse stuff with big technical debt, move it to either functions inside SW you already own (even if they are not completely taylor made) or to SaaS. That way your VM stable will be smaller, migration will be faster and easier, and the bill from whatever replaces VMWare will be "even moar" cheaper.

True android boxes, with full android support (not AOSP). Problem is, no subsidies.

Which means, low quality low performance at low prices. Or Decent Quality Decent performance at high prices, or anything in between (including low quality, low performance at high prices).

The reason why many sideloaders gravitated towards the amazon fire TV ecosystem was that it was subsidized, therefore, decent performance (once you left the home screen and entered your sideloaded app), decent hardware, decent quality, decent SW support, super-low price

If you have a Walmart nearby, ONN TV boxes vahe a good reputation of middling performance, decent build quality, not so great SW updates track record at a low price. But buyer beware, walmatr got serious about you using the box in the country you bought it, so, if you buy one in the USoA or europe and get it to LatAm or the middle east, it will not work propperly.

I simpatize with the sentiment, but the firestick and OS division inside Amazon is different from the Tat-Baazar division of amazon.

In super-large companies, divisions seldomly, is ever, talk amongst themselves, are ultra large companies in themselves, and sometimes have conflicting goals.

Think of sony, the Media division was puting rootkits in music CDs, and selling region locked DVDs. MEanwile the consumer electronnics division was selling multiregion DVD players with DivX support, with extremely good read support of DVD Writeable media (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW).
Other times, incentives align, think of the MiniDisk with the copy protections, or the Memory Sticks with content protection....

Only time will tell if the Firestick division and the Tat-Baazar divisions align or diverge.

Two things can be true at the same time.

Yes, is true that AI is a bubble, and is over-hyped.
Yet, is also true that AI has an important and valuable role to play in software development.

But you do not have to trust me, as I am some internet rando, instead, trust trustworthy (redundancy intended) people like:

Linus Torvalds:

https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...

Greg K-H:

https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...

The Firefox team:

https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Please also notice that the source of the links and its comunity is not particularly AI friendly, so... ... So, again, two things can be true at the same time...

Yes and no. I've seen the same sht happen twice, in the same year.

First in the telco crash of early 2001, when telco shares collapsed, in no small part dues to the backbone fiber rollouts done for the nascent internet (as well as many telco customers became illiquid bidding for 3G spectrum), said backbone sat unussed for years (and the spectrum too), but, at least, the fiber did not depreciate at an alarming rate...

But then, by the middle of that same year 2001, the Internet bubble bust. Untold ammounts of datacenter capacity went unused, cooling and motorgenerators dimensioned for big loads faced significantly smaller loads, racks upon racks of rapidly depreciating servers went unused, and untold ammounts of warehouses and perishable inventory (think pets.com 's pet food) sat there, again, unused.

Well, the world recovered, the internet provet to be worthy, the telco fiber and spectrum saw a lot of use latter on...

The same will happen with AI... just pray the AI bubble deflates, and does not POP! (Pop! goes the world).

Linus Torvalds, Greg H-K and the Mozilla team are singign the praises on AI for software maintenance. And now a 19 year old FOSS grapghics driver is still getting software improvements thanks to AI!

And yet some zealots are saying that AI has no use whatsoever...

You know what? More than one thing can be true at once.

Yes, is true that AI is not a panacea that will replace every single coder/white collar job.

Yes, is true that judiciously used, AI can be extremely useful for many task inside many a job description, including sw development.

The world is not black and white, or even shades of gray, at least for an electronics engineer like me is not only in technocolor, but in even more wavelenghts, and polarized horizontally, vertically and elliptically to boot :-P

In developed countries, where people and companies can buy the hardware (say, a cluster of ryzen strix halos) it makes no sense to pay monthly for meta's AI. But in countries where people and companies can not bear the upfront costs? This actually makes sense.

Read again the list of pilot countries in light of the previous paaragraph.

Full disclosure: i live in LatAm, but not in Bolivia